Paolo, the General, her lover, had wrenched her from that fate to share with him a life of turbulent sorrows till she should behold the blood upon his grave.

She, like Laura Fiaveni, had bent her head above a slaughtered husband, but, unlike Laura, Marcellina Ammiani had not buried her heart with him.

Her heart and all her energies had been his while he lived; from the visage of death it turned to her son.
She had accepted the passion for Italy from Paolo; she shared it with Carlo.

Italian girls of that period had as little passion of their own as flowers kept out of sunlight have hues.

She had given her son to her country with that intensely apprehensive foresight of a mother's love which runs quick as Eastern light from the fervour of the devotion to the remote realization of the hour of the sacrifice, seeing both in one.
Other forms of love, devotion in other bosoms, may be deluded, but hers will not be.